Deeplinks Blog posts about No Downtime for Free Speech

Yesterday, Microsoft used a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notice to demand that a copy of the "Microsoft® Online Services Global Criminal Compliance Handbook" (the Compliance Manual) be removed from Cryptome, a security website. As a result, Network Solutions felt obliged to takedown the entire Cryptome.org domain, a repository for thousands of important and controversial documents.

As is often the case, the ensuing uproar simply called more attention to the document in question. Yesterday evening, Microsoft wrote to Network Solutions and withdrew its takedown demand, while insisting that its copyright concern was nevertheless legitimate.

Let's say you are a blogger who writes about music regularly and includes links to music in your posts. How do you avoid having your blog censored off the Internet by "DMCA takedown notices" sent out by music industry lawyers (as happened last week to several blogs hosted by Blogger)?

Imagine you're a music journalist who maintains a blog. You've just found a great, new, virtually-unknown artist that you want to tell the world about. How can you do so, in a way that is simple and convenient for your readers, but does not place you or your blog's host at risk of being sued?

Thanks to the increasingly aggressive copyright-enforcement tactics of the music industry, this has become a startlingly complicated question with no good answer.

(The Streisand Effect describes the phenomenon by which an attempt to suppress information results in faster, broader dissemination of that information. Roughly explained, attempted censorship -- particularly by a famous or well-known entity -- can flag the information as more interesting.)

Last October, we launched the Takedown Hall of Shame to highlight the most egregious attempts to silence speech online with bogus intellectual property complaints. Today, we’re inducting four more would-be censors into the pantheon of speech bullies. They are:

The closing months of 2009 saw the beginning of an unfortunate legal dispute in which a trademark owner, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, ran to court to punish political activists for using its marks in a political parody. Sadly, less than a week into 2010, another trademark owner, Peabody Energy, is also using legal threats to attempt to silence criticism.